We hear, from far away, a “howling” chant (Don Cossack style, mixed with Carmina Burana, with a dash of orthodox music and Chinese gongs; not forbidding either a taste of King Crimson or some folk music).
Enter the human horde pulling, or holding with ropes, a horizontal wheel of fortune on which is quartered the body of a naked man, whose head is covered with a shopping bag. The base of this wheel is mounted on casters. The frame of the wheel carries six inscriptions that go all the way around it: BIRTH, CHILDHOOD, SPRINGTIME, TRAVELS, THE CITY.
The horde is composed of fifteen disparate characters among whom there must be a blind monk and possibly a Japonese geisha, a bag lady from St. Denis street, a Quebecois lumberjack, a Scot, a Hari-Krishna, a distinguished lady, a frogman, a bank manager with his attache case, a transvestite, a woman in a bathing suit, a vegetarian, a nurse, a security guard, a Roman soldier, a medieval lady with her veil, a Marquis from the seventeenth century, Robespierre, the Ayatollah Khomeiny, Golda Meir, a cosmonaut, an Arab, the Apollo of the Belvedere, Mona Lisa or the figure of Liberty on the barricades by Delacroix, several children, some pets . . .
All these characters have their mouths wide open. They pull their burden. After several processions around the playing space the wheel is placed in the centre.
The blind monk spins the wheel in silence. The right hand of the tortured man bears a white glove. It stops on one of the inscriptions. The fifteen members of the horde point their flashlights on the designated inscription. For example: BIRTH. The blind monk proclaims: “the birth of the Crippled King.”
The choral music resumes at full volume, the horde exits dragging its load. We hear the music fade away in the distance for a long time.
This prologue is performed before each of the pieces of The Life and Death of the Crippled King when performed separately.
